ordinarily found in the same person.

I first met Louis Gallet in 1871. Camille du Locle, who was the manager
of the Opéra-Comique at the time, could not put on _Le Timbre d'Argent_,
and while he waited for better days, which never came, to do that, he
offered me a one-act work. He proposed Louis Gallet as my collaborator,
although I had not known him until then. "You were made to understand
each other," he told me. Gallet was then employed in some capacity at
the Beaujon hospital and lived near me in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. We
soon formed the habit of seeing each other every day. Du Locle had
judged aright. We had the same tastes in art and literature. We were
equally averse to whatever is too theatrical and also to whatever is not
sufficiently so, to the commonplace and the too extravagant. We both
despised easy success and we understood each other wonderfully. Gallet
was not a musician, but he enjoyed and understood music, and he
criticised with rare good taste.

Japan had recently been opened to Europeans. Japan was fashionable; all
they talked about was Japan, it was a real craze. So the idea of writing
a Japanese piece occurred to us. We submitted the idea to du Locle, but
he was afraid of an entirely Japanese stage setting. He wanted us to
soften the Japanese part, and it was he, I think, who had the idea of
making it half Japanese and half Dutch, the way the slight work _La
Princesse Jaune_ was cast.

That was only a beginning and in our daily talks we sketched the most
audacious projects. The leading concerts of the time did not balk at
performing large vocal works, as they too often do to-day to the great
detriment of the variety of their programmes. We then thought that we
were at the beginning of the prosperity of French oratorio which only